His Dark Materials: The Subtle Knife with Ella Risbridger

0:00Guessing is for game shows, not your business. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, with AI grounded in your context to get work done and done right. It's a new Workday.

0:23Hello and welcome to Magical Garbage, the podcast where our research is at risk of losing funding. My name is Karen O'Donoghue, and I'm the gang of roving children terrorising a cat. And joining me is the ex-nun with a zest for life and a hunger for the truth. It's Ella Rizbridger. Hi. How can all three of those things exist in the same novel for 11-Up?

0:44That's what I ask of you. How is this book real, and how is it actually for children? I guess the main questions are, how is this book real, and how did this book get published? And do you think you'd be able to get away with it today? some big questions I'm just starting us off with the light ones easy impossible to tell I know like the thing about Philip Pullman is that he's very old now and there's no getting around that and so like he's been answering questions about his dark materials for so long that I think there's some kind of there's kind of an interview sickness that falls over creators who've been talking about the same thing for a long time which is that they they often they build a little myth or they build a kind kind of a series of stock answers that they just kind of sort of wheel out to sort of protect their own mental fortitude.

1:31And so it's gotten to the point where I'm no longer interested in hearing from Philip Pullman about how he made these books. What I'm fascinated in hearing about is the people who behind the scenes, like I would love to talk to the editors and publicists who were dealing with this at the time. And also, I actually, I feel like I should know this, but I don't know how this book was like marketed at the time. I don't, you know, it's sort of always been in my life. I mean, what year did it come out? We should say what book we're talking about, girl. That will be in the episode description, but it's The Subtle Knife.

2:03It's the second book in the His Dark Materials trilogy. And it is also a book that we said we'd cover in July. And if anyone who has the calendar will know, it is now August. Life's hard. Because life's hard. Life's long, life's busy. And as I keep saying this week July is the November of summer As you know I disagree And think that August is the November of summer In that it's the worst month of the year It drags along And everyone's always away So what I So my general November is Are always like Ooh I want to like Eat soup and Stay indoors And watch films Because I know I'm going to be going out a lot in December And like I feel that way about July It's like I know I'm going to go out a lot in August I know I'm going to go to the Fringe I know I'm going to go to a music festival I know I'm going to be doing stuff So I'm just going to stay inside all the time And do nothing in July We lead such different lives What I feel is that everyone I know Is going to music festivals in the Fringe In August Therefore, I'm not going to those E.g.

3:04you I'm not going to those places Because I like to be indoors I like to be indoors or on a hill And not at a festival On a hill Well, you know, like in the nature yeah sure breathing deeply i'm not really a sort of tense in a field or crying in the road in edinburgh person those are the options yeah we've been lax in covering this book series but um doesn't mean that we're not going to do it diligently today also it came out in 1997 so we're either 18 years too late or you know right on time right on time um so my experience with this book is um I only really read his dark materials in my early 20s and was completely gobsmacked by them but but when I was very young maybe like 11 or so my me and my mum were on holidays in Kerry, where there isn't a bookshop that sells books for kids for, at the time, at least an hour's drive.

4:07So my mum kind of like would go and make the drive and pick me up something. Sometimes I'd go with her, sometimes I couldn't for whatever reason. And she would find me something. And that is how I ended up with the Harry Potter books. That's how I ended up with like half the books, like Chinese Cinderella that I loved as a kid, because I would have one book for like the week or the two weeks holiday, and that would be the thing. And she picked up for me the subtle knife and I've never thrown a bigger temper tantrum at her than that day because I disappeared into my room with it for a while and I did she didn't know it was the second in a series I didn't know I could not follow it at all and I also thought the word subtle was the ugliest word I had ever seen on paper in my life I had like subtle I was like I had like synesthesia for the word subtle except it made me want to get sick I was like the subtle knife why the fuck have you bought me a book called the subtle knife she's like it's subtle I was like that's not better it's a weird title for a book for kids yeah it's not it's so unlovely in the mouth like it's like I really love the word subtle the subtle knife I love that it's got a little the b is so subtle it's like a drawing of itself yeah like the word bed yeah yeah exactly um what's interesting is my experience is sort of similar-ish in that I also did not know it was the second in the series and read it first and I mean I'd read lots of Philip Pullman so I was just like I'm gonna have a good time I always have a good time with Philip Pullman and loved it and then went back and read the northern light and then read the other one but i loved the subtle knife so much that i stole it from my grandma's house the other where did your grandma have it yeah she had a lot of books okay fair enough i don't know she's a primary school teacher oh that makes sense okay um but yeah i just stole that middle one and like i can still picture the copy that i was reading it was got it got so wet because i was always just like reading it in the bath or in the rain and rereading it.

6:09Whereas I never, like I love this book. I say it's my favourite of the three. Really? Okay. But I really treasured this book in a way I didn't necessarily treasure Northern Lights. Like I loved Northern Lights, as we all do. But Northern Lights, Northern Lights to me was like, oh, this is an amazing story. But it felt kind of in the realm of things that kids read. Like it was pushing me, but it was still like. Yeah, there's like talking bears and like. There's witches, there's magic, there's snow. It's a little girl and a brave adventure. this book is not that book. This book starts with essentially like a child carer.

6:45It has notes of the Tracy Beaker about it. I got notes of the Jacqueline Wilson about it, right? There's a kind of vibe to it. So I think maybe a small recap, which is that this book is the second in a trilogy. And the way Philip Pullman does that is he opened it by introducing you to, by literally starting with a brand new character in a brand new world, none of whom you've ever heard of or met before and also the world is our world so there are things like cars and supermarkets and washing powder which if you remember northern lights is nothing like that so if you came to it off the back of and we're just about to we've just crossed the bridge into a brand new world what will happen there and then you open this book and it's like here is a child carer living in some neglect in 1990s Oxford or Winchester and then he goes to Oxford yeah 1990s Winchester what what a pivot what a shift yeah and it's it's like it spares it's really really smart and really bold to be like it's he's not just like a random kid from our world he's really living in the kind of sort of detritus of sort of functioning poverty it's like it's a lot of baked beans it's a lot of fish fingers it's a lot of scrabbling change together it feels dirt under the fingernails it feels very like of our world it's very of our world and i think so the key thing about will is that will lives with his mum in winchester and will's mum is some flavor of mentally ill possibly or possibly she has got a sickness from another world it's actually not that relevant what's relevant is that she is not taking care of him for example whenever they go to the shops if they leave the house she thinks she might be being followed yeah and a central question of the first chapter is is she paranoid is she a paranoid schizophrenic or are they being followed and if they are being followed this time does that mean they've always been followed so will's mum for instance they'll go to the shops and there's this incident where she's like someone stole my purse one of the enemies one of these followers has stolen my purse so we have to go back around and put things back on the shelf so no one notices and I'll just pay with these coins and they go around and it's a game and Will suddenly realises halfway through the game that his mum is genuinely terrified and then when they go home the purse is in the middle of the coffee table and that's Will's childhood and Will's dad is, you know, gone dead possibly will's not completely sure he thinks he's gone exploring somehow it's all kind of quite fuzzy because will's main job is keeping his mother safe and it's such a change it's such a change from lyra yeah i mean if you compare that first chapter to the first chapter of northern lights where it's like pantaliman and lyra are hiding in the cupboard of this grand room in Oxford and there's wine and poison and you know all these beautiful like that a severed head and all kind of stuff magic it's magic sparkles glitter like and the words that you've never been from you've seen before like demon words like pantalimon which are just so immediately arresting and like yeah um barric light and you're like it's like this really world full of majesty and the unknown and just sort of like twinkling sort of phosphorescent like oh something crazy is going to happen and like to then open your second book on like as you say well it's it starts with will is taking his mother to try and drop her off at the home of his old piano teacher and it's this immediate reversal of parent child the sort of parent child setup in that he's desperately trying to persuade his piano teacher that she should look after his mom so that he can go off and do something yeah and it's such an unsettling thing to read as a child be like but why is he taking his that's what mums do your mum takes you to the piano teacher is like can you look after will for a bit i gotta go rather than we'll be like please i need to sort something out urgently and it's like you know over the course of this book and over the next book and over uh the third book as well you know lyra and will obviously come together and they become like dear dear friends but like lyra's brilliance as is like you know highlighted so much in the first book is like that she's this kind of courageous spontaneous thinker this expert liar this sort of like she her it's all instinct with lyra but like will is this like quite complex lateral thinker where he's like if this happens then this will attract suspicion which will then attract this which will then bring the police which will then that he's always thinking six or seven steps ahead because he's always had to live in this kind of cloaked way of like yes like sort of have the least suspicion as possible like he speaks about um about how his sort of trick for survival is like sort of blending in and becoming like part of the furniture and like I remember when I did eventually get around to reading this book thinking it was so genius that like he's trying to he's out in Oxford and he's not in his school uniform and he knows that he's going to attract attention for being a kid alone so he buys a clipboard from like wh smiths and just tries to make it look like he's doing a research thing i mean it's a perfect disguise yeah a kid with a clipboard it's like oh instantly oh you're doing some kind of project it's some kind of away day it's some kind of school you're gonna ask me questions about like how do i think that the recycling system could be improved you know yeah it's so that hi do you have two minutes we're year six at primary school and we're doing a product about what residents think of recycling.

12:29It's so like that thing of if you gave any man a high-vis vest, he could do whatever he wanted for a day. He could just set up a traffic cone in any street and if you give any child a clipboard, they can do whatever they want because everyone's like, oh yeah, your school's that you do that kind of thing, aren't they? You count the trees in the park or whatever. Three 11-year-olds holding clipboards I'd be like, do whatever. I'll literally answer anything you ask me. That's spooky. Someone don't exploit that loophole. Anyway, so what Will has to do, the reason he needs to drop his mum off at the piano teacher, is because he needs to go home and search his house for a green leather writing case that his mum is hiding from him.

13:11All ready to be like, I need to overrule my mum's authority here. And he searches the whole house, and he falls asleep because he's tired, and he wakes up, and it's one in the morning, and he knows that the men are in the house. and he's right so this is the the real like from the beginning we're like four pages in and already you have the sense of total destabilization which is that the parent-child relationship is all wacky you're not in the world you expected to be even though it's your world so your world already feels weird and discombobulating to you because you're like well where is everyone's demon i picked up this book expecting there to be demons and animals and magic and you're saying there's none.

13:54Like you're already on slippery footing. And then, and then Will kills one of the men. Chapter one. Yeah, he's 12 years old and he's just murdered an adult man. Yeah. He pushes him down the stairs, I think. Yeah. And I remember as a child being like, well, he's not dead. And then quite soon after Will meets Lyra, Lyra asked the alethiometer, like, who's this guy? And the eletheometer says he's a murderer and i was like oh shit oh it's a great lyra thing of like so she knew she could trust him he killed that guy for real yeah i mean it blew me away as a child the idea that it's like oh he's the hero of the book yeah and he's this lateral thinker and we already know that he's a real logical step-by-step kind of guy yeah and we know that he's we know that he's a good guy he's so worried about his mom and he's just murdered this man who's come to his house yeah would you say like i all kids books have some kind of dealing with morality in some function or another i think just because naturally it's dealing with characters who are moving through the world growing up through the world and trying to decide what's good and what's bad but because like so much of his dark materials is caught up with sort of religion and the right thing there's this really interesting sense throughout the subtle life in particular that's like of shifting morality and how things are different kinds of right and wrong depending on your perspective like for example skipping ahead a bit when they're in Chittagatze which is my favorite of any sort of imagined world even though it's so scary and terrible um they talk a lot about how they've stolen the subtle knife or they've taken the subtle knife from this character who who dies soon afterwards and then this band of children two of whom are his family um try to get revenge on him and tried to kill him and lyra and both will and lyra are like yeah we do the same do you mean it's like it's like fair's fair guys fair is fair we killed your brother you want to kill us yeah we killed your brother we stole his magical knife anyway so like just to jump back so we can actually thread straight through to chitigatse yeah will is then obviously wandering the streets of winchester yeah and he doesn't know what to do because he knows that quite soon someone will come looking for these men these men aren't the police they aren't the social services but they have been asking will's mom a lot of questions about where his dad is his dad's a guy called john parry who was an explorer will finds the green leather case and it's like i have to get out of here because quite soon the guy i didn't kill is gonna come back and kill me and that's my best case scenario because the other one is social services and the police and being tried in court and someone finding out that my mother is kind of not not okay and so he's kind of just wandering the streets following a cat and he likes this cat it's like his own cat his own cat's called moxie i hope she's fine um following this cat is after did he go to oxford first he gets like a yes yes yeah why does he go to oxford again is because the in the letters is his dad's lawyer lives in oxford or something yes yeah yeah i it's just there's so many details he goes to oxford he changes he says he goes by a false name then he gets on the bus and goes to oxford he goes to the lawyer the lawyer says he can't tell him anything then as he leaves the lawyer's office he sees the other guy the one he didn't kill going into the lawyer's office you know it's all murky he's like oh yeah i've not successfully left so he's walking around oxford he follows this cat he's like oh that cat looks like my cat sad sad because of course he'll never see his cat again because he is you know running from the law but also about to go into a different world.

17:57And what he finds walking around Oxford is a window in the air. Exciting. And the cat steps through this window in the air and it's gone, completely vanished. And Will follows her. And on the other side is Chittagatze. I think, not to make this podcast be about Skip Shock, but i do think that that moment of stepping through a space on a sort of rainy oxford day and ending up in chitagatse has a lot of common dna with the skip shock thing of being like and it's different here and the air is different and it feels different because i think that's one of the things that will notices first right is that he's like oh it's hot like it's kind of like a like it I picture it like Italian LA or not LA but like oh maybe like Venice I don't know do you know what I mean like it's very American I think I I sort of more pictured like South America oh yeah that's probably Italian Mediterranean America yeah yeah yeah I guess yeah yeah America's Mediterranean South America yeah like like a Peruvian city or something is kind of how I imagined it um but I guess Chittagatse?

19:19I don't know. You know, it's, it's, it's all a different thing. But I think the, what Chittagatse looks like isn't as important as what it feels like. And to me, what it feels like is like a surrealist painting kind of thing. Like you can feel like the melting clocks on the landscape kind of thing. It's very melty. It's so melty. It's so dreamlike. And it's like every, and that's my favorite thing about this book is reading about Chittagatse and just the sensation that I have physically when I'm reading it. Like the sense of kind of walking through a dream of like meals abandoned halfway through eating, like the risotto that's been abandoned.

19:55It's like an abandoned cruise ship. Yes. Like, it's like, you know, you know when you're on like a holiday somewhere hot and it's like, and there's all adverts everywhere and there's adverts everywhere for like drinks that are almost like drinks you recognize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Fandlemon. Yeah, sure. you know when you're like oh and this is it's called kika cola oh yeah or you know when you're like that sensation of when you're like driving through some sort of like like no horse town in the middle of like portugal or something where it's like literally it's like two cafes and a church kind of thing you know that sort of vibe and and but there's a cafe the cafe has like uh umbrella sort of awning that's walls ice cream and it's that weird strange feeling like like oh you have those things we have that too yeah also the feeling of a siesta yeah oh my god that feeling of a siesta feeling of going into a town it's like when you go into a i mean i've i've been to other countries but france is the place that i know best where my family live um and it's like if you accidentally go to a french town between 12 and 2 and you're like or on a sunday or on a holy day or something everywhere closed and it's like certainly everywhere's closed that feeling and it's like you can kind of like and because people are usually having lunch or like if it's very hot in the south of france like a siesta it's like doors are open and fly screens are down so you can see like oh there's food on the table in there like or like the shop has just got like the mesh screen over but the door is open and you're like yeah we just got here and i'm so hungry and it's like we can't get in yeah these are locked up these are like little like museum dioramas to you yeah and it's that feeling of walking like around a town and being like surely we'll see someone what what's great about like every time i reread the subtle life is that i completely forget why chittagatse is like it is every time and it's like it unfolds to me totally completely new because chittagatse is like the marie celeste right yes everyone has left except for kids and the reason for that is any adults in the town are in like the most horrendous danger you can think of i don't really know how to talk about the specters because they're such a rich scene specters are invisible to children but they essentially eat away at a person's soul yeah they eat your demon in some way they're kind of the reverse of what was happening at Bolvanger which is that they you know they were the intercision process that was happening in Bolvanger with Mrs Coulter of like separating children from their demons is happening here but in a more kind of primal predatory way with these sort of yeah these spectators who I'm just kind of imagining as ghosts really these kind of just malevolent ghosts who are just eating eating the demons eating the souls of these people these people in Chittagat they don't actually have demons so they're just like yeah eating their life for is eating their consciousness yeah they don't have demons they're not like going around eating the animal yeah but the part of you as you know if we were in lyra's world we'd all have a demon and that demon would if we went into shigatze be eaten by the specters and that part of us that would be a demon even if it's not outside our bodies can also be eaten by specters yes and the effect of this is to render a person a non-person essentially like sometimes you see a person who's had their demon eaten and is still alive and they're just kind of like picking at their skin or just like just like shuffling doing nothing there's a part a little later on where Lyra is watching, Lyra's with the witches and they're watching Chittagatse from above.

23:50And they see that there's a band of kids and adults all fleeing. And I know Lyra's not watching, it's just the witches, I think. And they can see the spectres are coming on this little band of, I guess maybe like two or three families and they're fleeing. and the second they see the spectres come upon this family and they also see that suddenly the man and the woman with the horse just ride off they abandon the others and they gallop and gallop and gallop away and they're all furious they're like who are these cowards yeah and after about 20 minutes the spectres have finished feeding they've killed every adult they've left all the kids including a newborn baby yeah and they realize oh no the people on horseback have to get far enough away so that someone can come back and look after the kids because otherwise the kids will just die and and so yeah the the jodigata is full of these kind of gangs really of roving kids who kind of go around together who are just kind of wild right yeah because there's no adults because they have all been they're not even dead they're just gone yeah they've just fled but like when Lyra so Will goes into Chittagasse and he's like this is perfect because I can sort of like provide for myself, the climate is nice the architecture is lovely there's eggs, there's Coca-Cola yeah and he's like looking after himself and like you know he's very sort of moral and leaving money on the counters leaving money on the counter of shops and like breaking into a house and being like okay well I'll keep it really nice exactly, and he's like it's quite dusty here but there is food and the fridge is still running and things.

25:38Yeah, yeah. And that's when he runs into Lyra and this is the first time we've met Lyra since the end of Northern Lights where she steps into the new world in order to like find dust. That's all that question mark. Yeah. And you realise, of course, that Lyra's new world is Chittagatze and Will's new world is Chittagatze and now they're here in this one house and they're both quite surprised, I think, by each other. To be like, and you're not from here? and honestly Lyra can't let anything go like can't let that be like no I actually know my way around I'm a researcher here to look for dust you're a very dirty child who hasn't eaten in days it's great seeing like Lyra through the eyes of someone from our world because like everyone who's met Lyra up till now has been like god this kid was gutsy and full of vim and I would do anything to protect her and Will's just like you are really filthy you are and also maybe dumb because she's never heard of like an omelette or like she doesn't know how to cook for herself.

26:40She's never washed her own hair before. And it's so strange because we've known Lyra for so long in Northern Lights as like this completely self-sustaining, like independent spirit. And, but like in a sense, there was always somebody kind of looking after her in Northern Lights and her looking after herself. I don't know baked beans. I don't know baked beans. And he's just like, there's some baked beans. You can open them. and she's like, I don't know baked beans. And also that part where he's like, I cook so you can wash up. And she's like, I'm afraid not. That's what servants do. There's loads of clean ones.

27:16I'm sure a servant will deal with it. And he's like, you have to wash up. And you suddenly realise how far Lyra is. And I was like, even her language is different. And they're like, where did you come from? And he's like, Winchester and then Oxford. And she's like, I came from my father's house on Svalbard, but I'm glad you also know Oxford. And it's like no 10-year-old in our world would be like, from my father's house. Yeah, yeah. In that world, she's a princess. And in this world, she's just a little urchin who tries desperately to make an omelette and doesn't know you can't put the shell in.

27:46Oh God, when she... Makes her foul burnt little omelette. A burnt omelette. Horrible. And the thing is, okay, so we've had that major shift of like, finally we've got Lyra. Yeah. We've got Lyra and this murdering boy carer. Yeah. And they're trapped in a holy world. And that is chapter one. Is that just the first chapter? Certainly. Because chapter two, we abandon them both and go to the viewpoint of Seraphina Peckel of the witch. Oh my god, that chapter is like... The thing about Southern Life in general is that it very much is a bridging book. Like, it's following a lot of the ideas from the first book around kind of dust and consciousness and what that means to different people.

28:29but like it's very set up-y in terms of like we're getting all these new characters and people who are going to aid in our eventual sort of goal in killing god but like in order to make it not seem like set up it's filled with these like what feel to me like miniature action films and like when we open on Serafina Pecola in chapter two it's like a witch is being tortured for information by Mrs. Coulter and her people. And like, it just feels like, I know nobody has a gun, but it feels like everybody. Everyone's got a knife. Everyone's got a knife, yeah. But like, so this, so chapter one, a child kills a grown man who is trying, who is chasing him.

29:11And then he goes into another world with Lyra where you realize that Lyra is completely like helpless looking after herself. Chapter two, Seraphina Pekela. You're suddenly in the viewpoint of this very sexy and powerful witch who is trying to choose which side of killing God she's on. And then she makes herself invisible, goes into a room where Mrs. Coulter, someone we know, is torturing a witch to death. And then there's that bit where the witch is just like, Yambayaka, come to me. And she's like praying for death. So Serafina Pekela slits her throat. Yeah. Chapter two. Chapter two of the children's book, we've had two on-page deaths yeah real deaths as well because that's the thing about when will pushes that guy down the stairs he's like yeah the angle of his neck the way his limbs fell it's like oh that's vivid yeah it's vivid the way his limbs are on the carpet and you're like oh i see it i see what it would look like how you would know instantly i mean i feel like that's how the way a lot of this book is structured where it's like it'll be Will and Lyra like doing something doing something they're kind of japes or whatever and then it will flick to a random adult which is really interesting to me it'll be like you know one of the witches or at least Goresby or one of my favourite characters ever Mary Malone or whatever and it's really interesting because like so much of the received wisdom in writing YA is that you don't write point of view characters who are adults but there are so many in here there are so many and they're like not even having these sort of like you would think that to have an adult in a children's book or a YA book that they would constantly to verify their kind of existence at all they would be like constantly talking about the child characters but they're really not like they're talking about like their love affairs their funding applications they're talking like there's so much in here about how governments control research based on what they'll grant funding to yeah a hell of a lot and as a child I was really like yeah fantastic need to have this in there and you do yeah you do you do need to have that in there I think this is part of why these books were and are so successful is there is not a shred of talking down to children like there's a kind of understanding that like oh you may not have heard of like grants but a grant is money that a government gives you but there now you know yeah depending what research you're doing and if they like the research you're doing they give you more and if they don't they give you less and it's like the implication there is good no you understand there that governments control what what information we learn and it's like it doesn't say that you just have to figure it out it's like oh i guess governmental control of scientific thought is bad file that one away for 15 years time i'm nine and i am nine i'm nine i mean like the whole sort of like i mean as i say this this is a book a kind of abridging book that has a lot of little action films scattered throughout it and that are brilliantly brilliant fight choreography brilliant like you know that that scene where they're trying to flee the children into the gatsay and will cuts a staircase in half with a subtle knife is like breathtaking and incredible um but then in between you have these adults who are essentially having conversations as we say about their lovers about their grant applications and very much about quantum physics.

32:45This is a book about quantum physics. Such a book about quantum physics. I just opened it at a random page and it's just like a long conversation with Asriel's servant about how he's waging war on God. What are angels? They're beings of pure spirit. And it's like, okay, a lot of information here before we get back to the adventure. Like if you look at the back of the book, Will is 12 and he's just killed a man. He's on the run. His escape will take him far beyond his own world to the eerie disquiet of a deserted city and a strange, savage girl called Lyra. Her destiny is linked to his own and together they must find the most powerful weapon in all the world.

33:20Wow, wow, wow. Go, go, go. That's true. However, interlinked is a lot of philosophy. And it's never boring. No. But, like, it is quite... Because I still feel like I... I mean, I understand quantum physics basically none at all. Like I know about like, like the, what's it called again? The slit experiment or whatever. Do you know what that is? No. Oh my God. It's such a ghost story. Can I tell you about it really quickly? Yeah, tell me about it, but slowly. Okay. So this is, this is everything I know about quantum physics. All right. I'm listening. I'm listening. So the double slit theory, right, is if you imagine a cardboard box that has two sort of coin slits cut in it, right?

34:01Yep. And then if you shine a light through those double slits, you'd get like two shafts of light on the other side, right? Yeah. Now, if you were to shine a, not a beam of light, but a gun filled with atoms, right? Okay. A gun filled with atoms that are constantly like darting through those slits as well. What you would, might expect on the other side is similarly to how the light behaves, right? The kind of two double slits, yeah, of light. That is not what happens. What happens instead is that they kind of muss up and they go all the protons and they all fuck around and they just create a sort of a random pattern.

34:38Fine. That's atoms behave differently to light, right? That's OK. We're cool with that. We're cool with it. Here's the scary bit. If you set up a camera, the atoms will behave like light. They will just go in straight lines. if you have like an infrared camera that is charting this they will know they are being witnessed how do we know that they will all go crazy what do you mean if we're not looking at them how do we know they've all gone crazy because there's like um evidence afterwards you see this oh yeah okay yeah i really urge all this i feel like knowing about this this time around of reading the subtle life a book for 11 up um has really increased my sort of enjoyment of it and then And also, if you turn the camera off, they go back to being fucky.

35:29I really urge you to Google this. I certainly won't. I don't want to know anything about it. It's so scary. What's important to me is to know that I do not have the mind of a scientist. Yeah, well neither do I. I mean, this is like... No, but when someone tells me something like that, my instinct is to be like, that is the great stuff of God, and I'm not religious. It's not my business. It's not my business. I have no right to know. I have no place knowing that. the atoms by themselves you guys go on I'll just be over here eating a biscuit I'm sure there are lots of physics minded people who's gonna write to me and be like you actually explained it wrong but I think I'm pretty much getting the gist of it right although I don't care if you explained it wrong but isn't it spooky as hell and also I feel like so so much of okay so to talk about the sort of like philosophical main argument oh please like so we know from the first book lyra is on a quest to look for dust because dust and we kind of understand dust to be this kind of uh original sin thing right i think before we get into this it's worth saying that what happens next is that lyra asked the alethiometer what she should do and she's like ah it's going to tell me to go and find dust and the alethiometer is like no no help will find his father and she's like what no that's not right and she kind of fudges it a little bit i think and then she's just like yeah okay well my mission's finding dust and yours is finding your father so let's go to Oxford together yes because there's a scholar the alethiometer says that there's someone I need to talk to in Oxford and Will's like okay great and I can go to the library and find out like do some research and what's good is pre-internet so it's microfiche and he's having to like look at things on a little slide because this book would suck if Will was just like googling John Parry missing John Perry Explorer what's good as well is that they're not really properly friends yet they're just kind of uneasy allies and yeah they're only allies because the eleotheometer's like you have to help you have to help and Laura's like I hate this he's a weird boy yeah and like there's a lot of like okay well I'm going with you because you can't survive on your own like well I'm going with you because you can't survive on your own I love them it's very nice I love them so they go to Oxford where Will finds out some things about his father and Lyra goes on a separate adventure to meet Mary Malone I love Mary Malone Mary Malone is a research scientist and also the best Irish person in all of literature and I know with what I can contend with when I say that she is the best Irish character in anything okay, I love Mary Malone so much.

38:13Mary Malone is an ex-nun who is now a research scientist working in Oxford and her whole thing is that she is yeah she's basically researching dark matter right like and she has uh found these kind of traces of what Lyra calls dust and what she calls shadows um in these kind of like like carved things from like dating back 30 ,000 years ago like essentially from the beginning of when people started being people when they started like making things and building things or whatever um these shadows these particles this kind of cosmic matter that is like the the the essence of what these books are about she finds them on this material and she thinks that they're conscious and she's built this kind of extremely complicated computer where you can like communicate with these this kind of cosmic junk you can't really communicate with it but you can make it do stuff yeah you can attach the electrodes to your head and fit yourself up to the computer and you'll be able to see evidence that something's moving independent like your thought is controlling the computer in a way is what Mary Malone thinks is happening yes exactly and like she's we meet her and she's on the brink of losing her funding as we know very important um and she's setting that setting getting ready to like basically shut down her entire department when Lyra just kind of like walks into her office with the alethiometer and is like oh yeah you're into dust I'm into dust let me let me show you and then she sits down at Mary's computer and she's like oh yeah I can use this like the alethiometer it's just a matter of like focusing your brain and like and just asking it questions yeah and it's forming pictures in the same way the alethiometer does in order to communicate with her and Mary Malone's mind is blown because she's like no it does things like the aurora borealis like it makes it makes shapes and colors and you can't control them yeah and And Lyra's like, would it not be easier if it was words?

40:06And she's like, what do you mean? She's like, no, but right, like the pictures are pretty. Like the random swirls of light are pretty, but like I can't read swirls of light, so it would be easier for me if they could just speak English. And obviously Mary Malone is like, what are you talking about? Yeah, he's like, yeah, we'd all like that. We'd all like that. And once again, Lyra's kind of put to the test, right? like you know in the first book where it's that thing of with the witch council the witch council of like which broom is it and also what are the intentions why is this sentence so clearly lodged in my brain what are the intentions of the tartars results with um respect of gamjatka which is the question which is the question that the consul asked her to check why is it in there it's been in there for 20 years and it's not going just a disease i've got i guess um what Lyra does to prove to Mary Malone that this is true is she says I've just been to the I've just been to the museum and there's some skulls in there and they've got the wrong date on and Mary Malone's like what and she's like yeah they're way older than everyone thinks I know that because I asked my machine and Mary Malone is obviously like what are you talking about and she's like so the one that had the skull that had trepanning in that's really old and the dust was all around it mary malone's like what are you talking about what how can you and these are all like ideas that are in the back of mary malone's mind about her research which ideas that she thinks of are so crazy that she can barely voice them and indeed her colleague oliver payne yes thinks that the reason that they're about to lose their funding is that mary malone is too wacky so the important thing about Mary Malone is I mean I love her as a character I love the way Ruth Wilson does her accent um which I find to be very true and I love the way that she is like an ex-nun turned physicist because it really gets to grips with what Pullman is really fascinated by which I think is the kind of relationship between science faith spirituality and just human beings being sort of conscious which is like we then learn that across these worlds whether it's Lyra's world and dust whether it's Chittagatse and the specters or whether it's our world and shadows or dark matter um everyone's obsessed with the same thing which is that human consciousness is not just this kind of ephemeral thing that happens inside of us it is like cosmic stuff that falls down on us from space and it has like it is a real substance like it's like an like a like an element almost yeah like it's like atoms right and if that subatomic the fucking double split experiment as I said subatomic particles what do they call them Rutherfords yeah they've got plenty of different names everyone's got different names for these particles but what becomes clear is that Lyra knows about these particles which are dust that also have a scientific name and that Mary Malone calls them subatomic particles and the problem of consciousness yes and everyone is every like sort of governing body in all these worlds are obsessed with controlling this and like the person who controls dust basically controls humanity right is like what they're saying but not saying yeah it's it's about innocence and experience it's about like the problem of people being able to have free will and think for themselves and make decisions and be kind of i guess in a way open to the divine yeah agony of saying that on a about a book for 11 year olds but it is about that it's about being connected to things bigger than bigger and wiser than yourself it's about being it's about being connected to all humanity through this common sense of we have consciousness we have free will yeah and like the way it's interesting as well because like so much of it's not that philip pullman vis-a-vis these books believes that god doesn't exist he just believes that god shouldn't exist like he thinks that god is a real office and like the authority or whatever he never says god outright really but the authority is a real sort of office he says about angels they are not angel does not represent their character it represents their station you know it is the job they do not who they are in a sense they are beings of light beings of light and like and there's one beautiful part where it says when the angels show up it's crazy that there are angels in this book um but like that they only take human form because we expect them to see human form if they were their true selves they would look more like architecture which i think is just so brilliant and uh but like he doesn't see science and religion as being separate he sees them all as part of the same thing this quest for understanding yeah it's all the quest for understanding and i think one thing that's very moving for me about mary malone is that lyra thrown into our oxford is pretty bereft because Jordan College does not exist yeah I mean and what a nifty way for a children's book to get round the thing of like I'm telling you an 11 year old a savvy 11 year old a story yeah to be like oh I know Jordan College doesn't exist actually you know I think that kids do everything like well it's obviously made up because I've been to Oxford and Jordan College isn't real you know what I mean and then to be like I thought Jordan College was real but to be like it's not real like when lyra finds out that it's not doesn't exist in our oxford yeah and she's so bereft she's like but that's my home yeah and she's in this city there's nothing like her city and she's like but i wanted to find the scholars yeah i wanted to find the dust scholar and and when she finally meets mary malone and she's in this like pokey little office you're a woman in an office with loads of like long wires why who are you but nonetheless the quest for knowledge is the same and she's like a woman huh mary malone also sets lyra a test everyone's always setting lyra a test saying like what do you know like find out something that no one knows and lyra says you used to be a nun anyway mary malone says come back same time tomorrow she finds will who's been having some big revelations about the fact that his dad was an explorer and there's a picture of him his dad holding him in the newspaper to be like you know man leaves baby to do exploring yeah goodbye my wife goodbye my wife um and is that is this the point where he also discovers the letters from his father they go back to chittagatze and liva goes to sleep and will stays up reading these letters and what the letters reveal is that john parry will's father has also climbed through holes in the worlds and has also gone to a different world which explains why he couldn't come back he writes these letters and the letters basically say we were climbing up this mountain at the top of the mountain there was a window in the air and i went through it see you when i see you

47:07and it's quite staggering for will to find out that he and his dad have had the same magical experience as i imagine it would be and I have to say I do think the Will's dad parts of the book are boring I don't care for Stanislaw Grumman I just don't care, every time he comes up I'm like I don't care so a spoiler that Caroline's just introduced is that Will's dad is not dead Will's dad is in fact a shaman who we don't know as Will's dad for a long time. We're looking for a guy called John Parry. We've also heard a lot about the explorer Stanislaus Grumman who, you know, it always feels so exciting to me because you remember that at the start of Northern Lights he holds up a head and he says, this is the head of Stanislaus Grumman.

48:03Yeah. We quickly find out that John Parry and Stanislaus Grumman are the same man. Wow, wow, wow. So he's dead, for sure. but he's not he's living as a shaman in the mountains because he couldn't he obviously couldn't find the window again because he climbed through a window in a blizzard fair enough fair enough it's blizzards on both sides if there's like one good excuse for abandoning your wife and child it's probably that he couldn't find the window back to the world you came from fair enough he climbed through universes in a blizzard yeah and now he's become like a shaman and his name is Jopari Jopari yeah which is very nice oh how excited I felt when I found that out and he is now there hanging out with our old friend Lee Scoresby Lee Scoresby the hot or not hot balloonist depending on your viewpoint after our last podcast I discovered that yeah nobody really thinks Lee Scoresby is hot, everybody would fuck the bear I think that says a lot about your listeners

49:07everyone's a grimy little pervert who seeks to be overpowered by an armoured bear. Speaking of Jorick Berenson, he's not in this book, but he's invoked several times, and every time it moves me to tears. It's the idea of having a mighty king who's on your side somewhere else. And the ways he comes up are always the ways in which... Boldness. Boldness of having a massive talking bear who everybody loves and then being like, not in this one, sorry. Not in this one, but we remember him fondly. The bit where she's kind of like her and will are becoming proper friends and she's really growing to love him and you know because she keeps comparing aspects of his character to york bernison where he's like he was a fighter true enough like york it's like york bernison um so will finds out and then immediately immediately will finds out that his father didn't abandon him and got in fact stuck at a window in the trees a window in the mountains we switched the bloody witches again you can't you can't make it up off we go back to the witches to see what's going on with the witches and what's going on with the witches is quite a lot of philosophical debate well what happens with the witches is the witches meet Lee Scoresby oh lovely we all love witches and Lee Scoresby and the witches and Lee Scoresby figure out what's going on which is that spectres eat grown-ups which is the first time we've really understood we see some adults get eaten by grown-ups and then how do we this problem with this book is intricate fucking puzzle box of a book is you're like so how did we get from the witches the witches essentially tell us what they're looking for and the witches are trying to explain to tagadze which is that the people of chitigatze were very wicked and they made holes they did something that caused the specters to happen because Chittagatse is what is known as like a crossroads world it's like many worlds back on to Chittagatse and so people who are moving between them are making all these kind of holes and slits or they're passing through and that is allowing these specters to sort of accumulate more I guess we don't know that yet we know none of that okay because remember basically this book is kind of the reason I keep thinking about like an intricate puzzle is so the witches are like we have to help lord asriel

51:39we need to find a sahatar do you remember that is that in this book yeah it is in this book yeah yeah we need to find a sahatar also separately there's a city called chitigatse and about five three hundred years ago all these specters started appearing and it's just got worse and worse and worse that's not really to do with us the witches are like not to do with us Lee Scoresby's like maybe it is and they're like no we're trying to find a sahatar we're trying to find this great this weapon and Lee Scoresby's like fine I'm trying to find Lyra

52:16and so you have this like weird in between thing that's just a lot of being told information which is that you need to understand what the weapon is and what the witches are doing and the kind of political history of the witches and what Lee Scoresby's about to go off and do and all these things are happening and everyone's invoking york burnison to be like we're all friends with york it's okay the bear says it's nice and then immediately you've kind of like great lots of inflation lots of information bam back in lyra and will's world lyra and will are so we haven't talked about the quest that lyra and will go on midway through the book which is that the alethiometer is stolen so that's what happens is they're getting chased by yeah so so the alethiometer is stolen by lord boreal they go to his house and they're like give us back our alethiometer and he says i will give you back the alethiometer if you go into Chittagatse where I can't go because I'm a grown up and I'll be feasted on by specters go into a tower in that tower is a knife there's a man who has the knife you must come back and bring me the knife and if you don't I'll have you killed essentially also I'll keep the alethiometer and I'll keep the alethiometer they go into this world and they've always they've already had this instinct from the the kids they've spoken to in that they're Angelica and her little brother and Paolo they have this older brother uh what's the name again instead of the tea Tulo something like that something that Tulio um that they have a brother but he's in hiding somewhere in the city and what Tulio has been doing is that he's in this kind of great temple where the subtle knife lives with the bearer of subtle knife who's this random old man called Joachim something or other and that Tulio is like tied up and tortured Joachim something so that he can be the bearer of the knife so that the specters will leave him alone because the specters for some reason are scared of the knife yeah the specters are scared of the knife and Tulio is quite a selfish man he's just like well then they'll leave me alone yeah yeah he doesn't know how the knife works he's just like has it yes so then the two of them go into the tower they Will enters in this bloody battle with Tulio where he ends up losing two fingers he loses two fingers and the cut will does not stop bleeding yeah because for days he has just lost two fingers yeah and no you know having two fingers calf at the stump is horrible however in the process of this battle he loses two fingers but he manages to stab Tulio until he dies yeah making this the second person that Will has killed outright, but the first time he's tried to stab someone to death.

54:52Yeah. He's a murderer. That's just his vibe. Anyway, they're there. The old man who's tied up is like, you're here. And Will's like, I'm not here. I'm really just passing through. This is a kind of side quest, actually. I'm trying to find my dad. And the old man's like, no, now you are the knife's bearer. And he's like, about that, no, because I will be trading it for my friend's magic watch. and the old man's like but you have the mark the mark of the bearer what is the mark of the bearer again? Caroline it's losing the two fingers on your knife bearing hand oh shit and the old man holds out his hand and he's lost the same two fingers oh my god I'm telling about this yes of course and Will's like well that just happened and he's like and that's how you know

55:40and he's like what are you talking about? and the old man says you can cut windows into the world. And it turns out this is the knife that cuts the windows. This is how you get from one world to another. Now you can escape whenever you want. And also it can cut any material at all, which is how it cuts that staircase in half. There is nothing it can't cut. Yeah. Nothing at all. There is no substance, no atom, nothing that it can't slice through effortlessly because the edge of the blade extends far beyond you can see it. And it's so thin. wow. So good. So Will's now the bearer of this knife. Will's now got a destiny and he's like, unfortunately, no.

56:21My destiny is find my dad. And this old man's like, seems like your destiny is bearing this knife for which you've lost two fingers. And he's like, what? He's like, you fought for it and took it. And so now you're bearing it. And Will's obviously like, oh God, this is a nightmare. How am I going to tell Lyra? Can't trade it back. And also, all the while, his fingers are on the floor looking like a pair of bloody quotation marks. Book for 11-year-olds. Book for 11-year-olds. Because they curl up after they get chopped off. That rocks me off, man. That freaks me out. Freaks my nut out to this day.

56:55It freaks my nut out to this day. To this day.

57:01Summer's supposed to be the easy season. So why are so many people quietly Googling a therapist between summer Fridays? Because more daylight doesn't fix the hard stuff. Sometimes it just turns the volume up. Grow does therapy differently. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow helps you find therapy on your time. The therapist you want takes your insurance on Grow. Grow accepts over 125 insurance plans.

57:38Sessions average$21 with insurance and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. Visit growtherapy.com slash ACAST today to get started. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. So there's Will. Fingerless. Fingerless and the wielder of the knife. I feel like Lyra, hi. And she's like, well, we've got to get the alethiometer back. And he's like, right, but now we have a secret weapon. Quite literally, we can steal the alethiometer back. It's interesting to me that one of the main things of this book is to get the alethiometer off Lyra.

58:26Because it's such a powerful tool. Yeah, it's so true. And you need to get rid of it. You've given her this essentially superpower in the first book. And then it's like, right, but what now? Yeah. Like, how do we possibly, we can't, we can't have her always know the truth of everybody. And there's a couple of different instances where she's about to ask about Will's father and she just, she doesn't because she's interrupted or because she's made some moral choice not to or whatever. You're right. Like so much of this plot could just be sort of solved if she just kind of asked the alethiometer everything.

58:58And like, yeah, it's, it's, it's one of those things where if you stand back from it, you can sort of see the joins of the plot. but like I'm so conscious as we talk about this that we're like okay hang on let's go back to this part this part whatever but as you say it has this kind of puzzle box logic to it where it just it feels like you're following the many strands of a movie and you just kind of have to accept you just wash it just you just kind of get washed along with it yeah and I think also one of the things that Pullman does which is why I think not very many people have tried to write books like this is that you have to be in the hands of a master storyteller you have to trust that for example they work out this elaborate plan to steal the alethiometer back they cut through one half of the room you know, they nip into different worlds they're basically using they're basically using Chittagatse as a kind of tunnel to get from one side of Sir Charles Latham's house to another one dreadful thing that happens, oh my god, Mrs.

59:57Coulter is there, Lyra realises that Charles Latham is Lord Boreal that she's seen him at the cocktail party that he's in league with the goblers he mustn't have the alethiometer she also hears them talking about her saying that the master of Jordan College had gone insane giving it to a child full of betrayal Mrs Colt is there Lyra sees her mother for the first time in quite a while bad bad bad since she saw her parents making out at the end of the world and then she's like oh right you're still here okay what a recalibration for me anyway they steal back the alethiometer great great success the cat from the beginning remember the cat the cat springs through and causes a distraction unbelievable unbelievable because it's kind of cat well yeah check off's cat yeah which for a book about schrodinger's cat he's being observed and i'm not observed it's so sweet anyway cat leaps through wow cat does a distraction lovely it's almost like will's got a demon everyone what Lyra's like wow it's so nice when he's got a demon I wonder what I look like when he gets a demon you're like wow so you've got that ticking away in your mind anyway they go back to Chittagatso Will's got his bleeding hand they've got the knife they've got the alethiometer they're back in this city and then

1:01:15I'm going to read the juxtaposition.

1:01:20She'd done what a good demon would have done anyway. We rescued her and she rescued us. Come on, Will, don't lie in the grass, it's wet. You've got to come down and lie in a proper bed else you just catch cold. I'll get a new bandage, I'll put some coffee on to cook, I'll make an omelette. We'll be safe now, we've got the alethiometer back. We'll do nothing now except help you find your father, I promise. She helped him up and they walked slowly through the garden towards the great white gleaming house under the moon. Chapter 10. The Shaman. lee scores be disembarked at the port in the mouth of the yinasi river and found the place in chaos with fishermen trying to sell them eager catches of unknown kinds of fish to the canning factories with ship owners angry about the harbor charges the authorities have raised to cope with the floods and with hunters and fur trappers drifting into town unable to work because of the rapidly thawing forest and the disordered behavior of the animals i'm just like bureaucracy to be to go from this action action action which is like cats meeping through windows there's my mother she's betrayed me let's steal it let's cut through the knife slice slice slice to be like there's quite a lot of problems with the canning factories it's like i'm sorry and this is pulmon's genius is that you don't you're never like oh god you're just like okay unknown kinds of fish and right right and what's the number one sort of um uh piece of critique you always get when a novel has multiple storylines it's always like the readers being like yeah i liked so i like this person but i give a fuck about these three people, you know?

1:02:41And like, he's not, apart from you not giving a fuck about Stanislaus Grumman. Yeah, to be fair, I just, I don't care for Stanislaus Grumman at all. I'm just, I do care. I'm always, I'm always so happy to be, I'm so happy to be with my balloonist. Drifting around, he's a mystery. And it's also like, I love to see magic happen. And that part where, so Stanislaus, so Lee Scoresby has arrived at the Yamisi River because he is trying to find Stanislaus Grumman because the witches have said to him that's the best way to help Lyra. And he's like, okay. Guess I'll do that. And he finds the shaman who everyone's like, the shaman will help you find Stanislaus Grumman.

1:03:24And the shaman is Stanislaus Grumman. Stanislaus Grumman is not dead. He is also Joe Parry. He manages to pull Lee Scoresby's mother's ring out of nowhere. Yeah. Spooky. Spooky. and like he's also dying of heart disease I believe he's not good to live in a world that's not your own yeah yeah he finds it he what the first bit of Stanislaus Grumman does for us is tell us that if you go into a world you get a the world where demons are you will find your demon and that's pretty amazing that's that's pretty incredible that's pretty incredible Grumman says Grumman says to the balloonist Lee Scoresby that he has summoned Scoresby to him and Scoresby's like no I came here with my own free will and he's like yeah how do you think summoning works I called you and you knew you had to come to me and he is essentially like I need the subtle life and Scoresby's like I need to protect Lyra and the Grumman is like okay well I'll get the knife and I'll look after Lyra they agree they go off together in the balloon to try and find this terrible knife one piece of information we learn from Grumman is that there's a witch who hates him yes he refused the love the most sexy and powerful witch and he scorned her and she said to him like live with me I will be the most beautiful wish there's ever been.

1:05:07Fantastic. And he's like, unfortunately, no. She's like, I will fuck your dick off. And he's like, I have to decline. It's so clearly that. There's so much sex in these books. I will fuck your dick off. She offers to fuck his dick off. And he's like, despite the fact you are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. And despite the fact that there's very little chance of me ever seeing my wife and child again. I will have to decline. With great respect. It's very that EB White. I must decline for secret reasons. um so lee scoresby says to him swear by whatever made you decline the love of the witch that you'll look after lyra he's like yeah fantastic no questions asked you and me we're balloonists now and i always want to stay with them much much longer the thing about the balloonist stuff is that i love lee scoresby he's a great friend of mine i love the ballooner's life i I love hearing about Hester, who is one of my favourite of the demons.

1:06:06I think she's just great. I love his sort of like Texan approach to things. But almost any time we hop in that balloon, we know something terrible is going to happen in that balloon. You know what I mean? I've developed like a Pavlovian response to whenever that balloon's in the air because almost always like, now the balloon's being attacked. Now somebody's holding on to the rope and like all this kind of stuff. It's like, oh, something terrible is going to happen if we get in that balloon. And it's just, the problem is we're like almost at the end of the book. There's about 100 pages left. And from here on out, it's all so bad.

1:06:40Yeah, it's a real bloodbath. It's, for example, it's Lyra and Will are like, oh, thank God, we've got the knife, we've got the alethiometer, time to set off and find Will's dad. And then it becomes clear that they have killed Tulo and that all of the children of Chittagatze are now going to murder them. With their bare hands, they are going to tear them limb from limb. And they really mean it. and they really fucking mean it and Will can't really find it. They really fucking mean it. They really fucking mean it. And Will's hand is bleeding profusely because again, he's lost two fingers to the most dangerous weapon ever invented.

1:07:21So Will is very weak because simply, like, I do think it's important if horrible and here's a trigger warning, but to really imagine what it would be like to have blood continuously pouring out of two missing fingers and how ill you would feel. And you're 12. You're 12 and you haven't eaten properly. You've been eating weird omelettes and beans for days. Yeah, it's bad. Lyra also can fight a bit, but mainly she's used to fighting with mud and punches. And these children are just like, no, I think we'll tear you apart. It's very, have you ever seen that old movie Suddenly Last Summer? I have not.

1:07:57It's a very xenophobic, scary movie. it's very like it's very southern gothic essentially it's about like oh this there was this beloved son of the household something terrible happened to him but nobody knows what it is and like we're going to lobotomize linda taylor because she's the only person who remembers and she won't stop talking about it and then it's kind of finally revealed in the last phase that um he's torn apart limb from limb and possibly eaten by cuban children that's so not why i was expecting but so clearly what was like every time i read about chitigatse and that was it was this Is this in Pullman's mind?

1:08:28Yeah, I think so. It does feel a lot like Suddenly Last Summer. And these kids are, like, they're rabid. Yeah. Also, like, they're properly feral kids. Like, their whole desire is to kill Lyra and Will. Yeah. They want revenge. Which Lyra and Will are both like, yeah, fair. Okay. Anyway, Lyra and Will end up perched on the top of a tower and the children are coming for them and they're going to die. And then the witches come. Serafina Beckelat. The witches come and they're like, we can't get down all the way. You're going to have to like leap up. And they leap up and they get swept away. Wow, wow, wow.

1:09:02Wow, wow, wow. So thank God. Finally, some adults are looking after Lyra and Will. Yeah. It feels like such a breath out when Lyra is finally like, it's Serafina Peggler. Yeah. Thank you. I was being killed to death. My mother is evil. My mother is trying to kill God. To go back to Will bleeding profusely for a second, I think one of the funniest parts of the book, and it's not a funny book is the um part where uh the old the aging kind of the old bearer of the knife is like i have ointment that will heal your wounds and then he takes this random like bottle of dettol he's like and he's like very powerful nothing like it in this world it's been brought back by travelers and you're like oh i guess so yeah i guess it has been brought back by travelers i it's kind of terrifying i've recently been watching for for secret reasons not for secret reasons just because it was on the telly a show from 2004 called true tribe which is where an anthropologist called bruce parry which i do think is not a coincidence but maybe it was because it came out after um travels the world living with uh indigenous tribes he's a person who's dedicated his life to being like we must protect indigenous peoples and their ways of life at all costs is it problematic maybe i don't know it's certainly compelling and there is this episode in which he goes to a remote island and a guy is he has the worst wound i've ever seen in my life and they're like yeah a tree fell on his foot and bruce perry who's not a doctor is just like i guess i'll be here with my antiseptic cream in my bag and they're all like wow this is unbelievable this is a magical substance you're like oh right yeah because we take it for granted all the time yeah if you have a minor cut you put antiseptic in it and it doesn't give you sepsis and kill you instantly.

1:10:53Antibiotic resistance. It's going to be a real shock to all of us when we all start dying of small wounds again. Oh, stop it. Sorry, sorry, but the world's a mess. The world's a mess and this book makes that very clear. And yeah, it also makes, Chiricata is like a world where it really shows how it doesn't take a lot for an entire society to crumble and be filled with bands of, of like roving murderous children. Yeah, because they've got Coca-Cola. Yeah, yeah, yeah. they've got coke and the kind of implication with Chittagatze is that like they once were a great place and then it was like basically greed it's like people constantly going in and out of other worlds that has allowed this kind of leaking of essence to come in right like the sort of all these spirits from other worlds who are just like devouring them in this parasitic way what do you think what do you think about that i think it's hard to get into without like getting into the whole problem of consciousness which is like i think chitagatse i think it was a prosperous city that did very well i think there's like it's somewhere between because i would think of it being a bit american but i don't know why i guess because they speak english um and like venice or somewhere like that somewhere it's like and they had the master craftsman they had the greatest craftspeople in the world and they weren't satisfied it's to do with greed but i also think it's to do with hubris and being like i can be greater than god you know it's kind of it's a big tower of babel for me this sense of being like and i can make something better than yeah god what's kind of fascinating is that i'm trying to formulate a thought here there's so it's it's in some ways it's kind of like that thing in islam of not drawing people or animals because you can't make it better than god and don't try and imitate god and there's something in like all those stories of like it's almost like icarus and daedalus making those wax wings themselves being like humans can fly why not yeah yeah and it's just kind of all through human history i guess there have been these stories about and this civilization thought they were as good as god and they started making like creations and doing things that no human should have the power to do and it's interesting to me that in loads of these stories people get punished and certainly the people of Chittagatse see it as a the specters as a punishment from god for their their hubris essentially and being like we can do anything we can all we can make anything we can make as much money we I don't know I think it's a complex little story yeah the story of Chittagatze and what's interesting also is that it feels like it feels like a morality tale yeah it does it feels like a fairy tale into which Lyra and Will have wandered and it's like oh right this is what happens after yeah they have like walked into the epilogue of another story a little bit yes because the fall of Chittagatze is something that happened like 50 years ago 300 years ago right i think it started happening 300 years ago but clearly it was long enough for them to be able to get coca-cola and like yeah baked beans yeah and for them to have had a thriving city until recently yeah it's got a lot worse recently yeah and we will i think find out why yeah do you know we in this whole thing we haven't talked about lord asriel at all he's not in it yeah but like he's building an army and everyone knows asriel's building an army the witches are going to help him any way they can by bringing him this weapon or not a weapon it's a hatter um so the witches are very much like it's all tied up together will's like where is my dad will's just obsessed with trying to find his dad he thinks he's been swept up in all this by accident yeah what i find very interesting is this idea that like this is a book all about free will and whether you have free will and whether there are like patterns in things yeah and kind of the answer is no the answer is like you're just an atom moving yeah i'm kind of a predestined course yeah yeah spooky so the witches pick up will and lyra and they fly them off somewhere safe and seraphina pekula is like lyra who's this guy about will and you're like oh right yeah last time we saw seraphina will was not in this story yeah yeah spooky and then of course because it's a life bam mary malone again went to mary malone having an argument with her colleague oliver about research funding and whether oliver is going to take a new job and this is where i love her the most where he's like you know that guy because like lord lord boreal has shown up at their office being like right i am very powerful very rich i sit in multiple government boards and i think there's something in your research um it could be used um in sort of defense sort of defense funding or whatever and also by the way if you've seen either of those two kids tell me absolutely everything you know about them or um you will be murdered in your sleep essentially yeah i mean what it is is that he starts off as like an old man he's like oh i am just an old man i know things through my own ways i'm sorry to hear that your research is being i'd be happy to have a word i used to be a civil servant used to be a civil servant let's say no more and then he's like and then mary malone's like yeah great have a word with the right people fantastic and he's like oh by the way i'll be telling you what results to find yeah yeah which is a huge you know the soviet union is invoked several times in this book and like there is something very cold war thriller about it isn't there about like it's a lot of like you know cloak and dagger it's a lot of like people trying to sort of fool authorities and sort of pull the you know do you get the kind of cold war spy vibe a cold war spy vibe i think particularly like there's a little description of charles latham slash lord boreal that i think is very interesting dr malone looked at him very clearly for the first time she saw a man in his late 60s prosperous confident beautifully dressed used to the very best of everything used to moving among powerful people and whispering in important ears oliver was right he did want something and they wouldn't get the support unless they satisfied him she folded her arms i mean i love her so much and like there's such a theme of this book of being like rich old men don't know anything don't know everything it's like sometimes people who look confident and prosperous and well-dressed yeah are the most evil of all yeah there's a real theme throughout all three books to be honest if it's like authority is very scary and authoritarianism is very scary and people who you know kind of swim in that sea will do anything to get to get anything yeah and there's a it's very interesting as well when someone has too much of anything they are immediately cast in a kind of a villainous light whenever anyone is surrounded by luxury or beautiful things or are beautifully dressed that is Pullman's sort of sign that like don't trust them like for example the first conversation that she has with Mary Malone like Mary Malone has like fuck all going on in her office and she's like oh I don't have any milk for the coffee but um I've got these ginger biscuits here and she's like a rumpled packet of biscuits in her desk drawer and that's like the way that we know we can trust Mary Malone the way that we know we can trust the witches is that they have no possessions and they have like dressed in like scraps of black material and any any character who's like beautifully turned out is evil god it's so true but you are allowed to have your one perfect possession you're allowed to have your knife you're allowed to have your golden compass um yeah but what is like i mean he's so creepy not boreal i think there's a bit where he's like i meant don't expect me to reveal my sources i mentioned the official secrets act a tedious piece of legislation but we mustn't be naughty it's like that's exactly the right tone of that kind of englishman yeah naughty like his he is just up to his elbows and blood do you know me up to his elbows anyway he basically is like i'll fund you but you have to do what i say and if you see this girl or this boy and you don't turn them in you'll die yeah and mary malone's colleagues like yeah i'm gonna do it dr albert pain is like yeah i mean it'll be nicely funded and she's like no and she's evil and he's like he's like defense funding she's like that means killing people and sometimes it really helps to just like have a character a grown-up smart character who we trust just lay something out incredibly simply even though they themselves are a very nuanced person defense funding means killing people yeah and it's it's kind of fascinating it's not just at the moment politically I guess it it always feels like things are relevant politically I'm sure any year I'm sure any year for the last 20 years this book has been relevant in new ways girl just to pause you on that I was re-listening to an episode you and I recorded five or six years ago maybe it was like our Mitford Christmas special and like we're talking in veiled terms the beginning of the podcast about how like you know especially right now it feels particularly important and I for the life of me have no fucking clear what we're talking about I think it might be about Boris Johnson or something about the election but like it's so strange it's so many podcasts I've listened to over the last sort of eight or nine years is like oh right now when things are particularly bad it's like oh wow things have felt particularly bad for some time now yeah I mean this is a bit of a diversion but like I've got a real non-fiction history kick and it's like oh like I've read a lot of books about uh the Soviet Union I've read a lot of books about chernobyl it's like that was a bad time read a lot of books about jfk for some reason why please someone stop me i'm turning into someone's dad it's like you are just really nuclear reactors and jf weather jf who shot jfk anyway and it's like oh right all of these were uniquely bad times to be alive that's it's always bad anyway but i think am i okay to read one bit Yeah, please.

1:21:05I think this is very, like, pertinent. He ran his hands through his hair and said, well, no, nothing's signed. It would be different. I think we're on to something. What are you saying? I'm not saying. You're hinting. What are you getting at? Well, he walked around the laboratory, spreading his hands, shrugging, shaking his head. If you don't get in touch with him, I will, he said finally. She was silent. Then she said, oh, I see. And this is the bit that I think is particularly, like, timeless. Mary, I've got to think of, of course you have. It's not that, no, no, no, you don't understand. Yes, I do.

1:21:42It's very simple. I'm off. It stinks. You go ahead. And it's like, the Mary I've got to think of is so everybody who's about to do a bad thing, to be like, oh, I've actually got to think about, it's like, yeah, of course you have. I've got to think of my family. I've got to think of other things. I've got to think of, like, my research. like this will fund i've got to be sensible it's like right but it's like i've got to you know i want my laboratory to run i want to stay here and i don't want that and she's like right but he's just come in here threatened us both with death said he wants to he's gonna he wants information on two children and that he wants to find new ways of killing people with our research and he's like yeah I gotta do it and the thing he says which is the thing that everybody is faced with at some point or another and is often forced to contend with is like yeah but I would change it from the inside you don't understand it's like she's like I do it's very simple yeah it stinks it stinks it's so like beautiful I'm off it stinks anyway she gets her hangs up her lab coat leaves he calls Sir Charles but then it's midnight Mary Malone breaks back into her own office now there's security on the door what?

1:23:05why is there a security? security's got a gun there is armed security at the edge of her lab which she left three hours ago yeah that is so scary and and she breaks back in using Oliver's no no she breaks back in with her own id and and he's like i don't know i don't know and she's like you don't know who i am you don't know anything you've just been told not to let anyone in and she's like but it's my lab and she's like right okay this means that whatever i do here this is my one chance i'll never be allowed in again once he calls the person and what she does is she remembers what lyra said earlier which is why are you doing it with weird lights you could just get them to talk to you and she hooks herself up to the electrodes and she starts typing and they talk back the shadows dust subatomic particles angels they talk back and she's like this is crazy i'm talking i'm typing into nothing and they essentially say to her ask a question she's like are you shadows yes are you dust yes are you dark matter yes um what are you angels

1:24:26and they give her a quest and the quest is the first like really biblical thing we've had in this whole book and obviously the first book's quite heavy on the bible this book less so and what the dust says to Mary Malone, who, let us not forget, used to be a nun. Find the girl and the boy. Waste no more time. You must play the serpent. Wow, wow, wow. Wow. There's nothing else to say, but wow, wow, wow. It's so exciting. So it's just like this middle-aged scientist, former nun, on this quest that she doesn't understand at all and has just realised that she can talk to, like, dark matter and atoms.

1:25:08And it's so exciting. it's so exciting and terrifying as well because also we like Mary Malone what do you mean play the serpent and so she goes back home she says she does steal Oliver Payne's ID she doctors it at home and makes it all of Payne which I think is very good and um she she the the the computer like gives her an address which is the address of where the window is into Chittagatse she goes there it's been completely tented and full of security she goes up to the security and she's like yeah I'm Dr. Olive Payne and they're like oh you don't know Dr. Mary Malone do you because we have instructions to apprehend her and she's like no I actually hate her she's really evil I'm a different woman I'm a different Irish woman yeah and then she just goes through this tent which she thinks is going to be like I don't know has like a comet landed or something and then it's just the window and she steps on through and she steps on through and that i think would have been a fantastic place to end this book but instead something much worse and much more painful happens yeah it's a really harsh one it's it's probably like the saddest bit of the saddest ending to a second book series I can think of which is that we've got the witches we've got Lyra we've got Will they

1:26:42it's a essentially a huge terrible battle breaks out the witches can't cure Will's hand Will's hand and we've got Stanislaus Grumman John Parry Will's dad that's a one man by the way Stanislaus Grumman Joe Parry and John Perry and Will's dad are all the same person. They walk into a bar. They order one drink.

1:27:10So, Lee Scoresby and Will's dad are coming towards Lyra and Will. They're finally going to be reunited. Scoresby's looking for Lyra. Will's dad is looking for the knife. Coincidentally, he's also about to see Will. Wow, wow, wow. He hasn't seen him as a baby. The witches are there. and then the forces of evil descend on them essentially the will manages to briefly sneak away and see his dad wow wow wow they sit together on a rock they don't like it they're very suspicious of each other obviously will's dad wants the knife will's like i'm gonna give you the knife i don't know who you are you're a stranger to me you're a weird shaman they look into each other's eyes they realise they have the same eyes and the witch who is protecting Will turns out to be the witch that Will's dad scorned and she shoots him through the heart and he's dead he's just dead he's just dead they've never they literally Will just says we never even knew it until that second he's just dead and there is no hope for him and then the witch kills herself okay okay right that's the ending is it no Unfortunately, the forces of more evil are descending on them and they are burning the forests with napalm.

1:28:36They are napalming the entire country to smoke out Lee Scoresby. Oh, God. Why are they smoking out Lee Scoresby again? Because they want the knife. Oh, right, okay, I think Lee Scoresby has the knife. They want to stop him getting to Lord Asriel. Yeah, I see. And they want Lyra and they want Will. and uh Will's just coming back down the mountain he's furious, he's like someone's just killed my dad he gets back Lyra has been kidnapped bad day for Will Parry bad day, forests on fire Lee Scoresby is in his balloon thinking I must do anything to protect Will, the witches and Lyra he is in a prolonged and terrible battle anyway he takes them all down with him but they eventually shoot him to death and his beautiful hair demon Hester she presses her poor brow brow broken self against him and then they died I'm crying I didn't even have to look that up that's too close to me Do you want to say it again?

1:29:51She pressed her poor, proud, broken self to him and they died.

1:29:59It's so bad. And he's done this and the last thing Hester says to him is, we're doing it for Lyra. Lee, we're doing it for Lyra. Oh my God. And it's all too late because Lyra's already been kidnapped and the planet is burning. Will's dad is dead. Will is bleeding. Will is not bleeding Oh yeah Because Will's dad Has helped him with his hand That's the one thing he does Is he's like I have a special thing Anyway Will's dad's dead Lee Scorsby's dead Lyra's been kidnapped The planet's on fire Oh And The Cliff ghasts Have Who are the horrible Terrible monstrous things Who have By the way Ripped up the balloon The balloon is also dead The cliff ghasts Have Through like fragments of things they have been talking about isa hatter this weapon that lord asriel seeks and how it will destroy god and how it is the subtle knife and a fox hears it and takes it back to the enemies so everyone knows everything everything's everything's lost and uh it's pretty bad and the witches are all gone many of them are dead including the one who killed herself out of shame and Will is there by himself and two angels appear oh yeah and the angels are like come with us and he's like that's Lyra's rucksack and they're like yeah yeah not important and he's like no that's lyra's rucksack with her alethiometer she'd never leave that behind never never never and the angels are basically like oh humans are weird come with us and will is just standing looking at his best beloved friends things that she would never leave behind she has few possessions and she fucking treasures them and will's just standing there staring and that's the end of the book good night sleep well children wait two years for the resolution of this story.

1:32:17Jesus Christ. And what I would say is, when you think about the book in these terms, it in no way conforms not just to the structure of a children's book, but to a novel in general. It doesn't resolve. It ends up in a much worse place. There's very little hope. How did you feel at 11 being like, and I guess this is a complete book, is it? The Subtly Knife. The Subtly Knife. Ugliest word in the world. Ugly word in which all these characters one million characters emerge and most of them die it's it most of them it's not most of them but loads of people you love and trust die that double whammy of the alamo gulch is awful like i have been listening to this on audiobook and i simply had to sit down very slowly in the middle of like doing a huge heap of laundry for some reason i'm always doing laundry i don't know why i was like sitting on the end of my bed like surrounded by like 1 ,000 things that needed putting away.

1:33:15Just like, I'm afraid I can't move. I'm afraid I'll be here silently staring and weeping

1:33:24because, well, dad is so brave. Then Lee Scoresby's there at the end and he's just like remembering what it was like to play like essentially Cowboys and Indians, I think, is what he's like remembering playing. He's remembering being a kid with like a little pop gun. And he's just like, oh yeah, we used to run and hide behind a rock. This is like that. except now everyone's got a real gun. And at the end, the last thing he manages to do is, like, he's got a little flower that Serafina Pekela gave him, and he's like, come to me, Serafina Pekela. And she gets there, and they're already dead. Oh.

1:33:59I remember just, like, thinking, why did you even... Philip Pullman, why did you give him a flower? Why did you give him... It could have helped him if the witches had come. And it's like, because that's life, man. what she does do is she puts a spell on his body so that it will not decay until it is disturbed and you're like oh i guess that's some comfort yeah is that anything it becomes vital in the next bit because it becomes vital in the next book which we will be covering in due course i would say is it even weirder? The third one is fucking weird. The third one's fucking weird. So because I...

1:34:45They're all fucking weird. I didn't read this trilogy until my 20s and then I had them just back to back or whatever. I kind of forgot that Subtle Life had this fucking crazy tragic ending. It really caught me by surprise. It caught me again by surprise just now. Everyone's dead. Everyone's dead. I can't stress to you enough that the brief respite of being like the witches are here it's gonna be okay we're all together oh and you're because you're a child yeah oh also you're a child and you're a reader so you're like yeah great finally will will meet his dad i don't know what will happen there but like will and his dad will like presumably have a conversation nope they just look each other in the eyes and then he gets shot through the heart and it's like not even random it's been seeded so long ago yeah that a witch hates him and wants him but it also has nothing to do with the main plot of eg killing god do you know i mean except that except that like the reason he angered ruta scardy was because he was like i i'm in love i love my wife and child and even i can't betray them i must be true to i must love i must be true to the thing i love even if it hurts me physically and i think that's a huge theme of of this book is like you must be true to the things you need your own moral compass and Stanislaus Grumman or John Parry or whoever he is by the end this is like one of the things he's got in his moral compass and I guess so much of these books is like find out what you live for and what you die for, you know?

1:36:21Yeah, because the actual it's interesting because one of the witches who's been with Lord Asriel comes back and reports the witches being like wow wow wow gals you're not gonna believe it like the lord asriel is gonna kill the authority and he he really maybe understand the ways in which religion is a curse on humanity and we have to fight for him and he's assembling an army and whatever and everyone's like i don't know it kind of sounds like a him problem it kind of sounds like a him problem and like the thing is is that like the things lord asriel is fighting for even though we don't trust or really like Lord Asriel because of him murdering Roger etc like we're like oh yeah that I guess is a noble cause but actually it's not really a book that's interested in noble causes as much as interested in the kind of like the interpersonal loyalties that people have to one another and that being the kind of greatest cause of all I think I think that's right and I also think that it's a book very concerned with like okay but where do you like a principle is good a principle is fine a fine thing to have but it will have consequences and it's like it's just such a big idea for a kid to be like john parry dies because he loved his wife and kid and he wanted to be true to them yeah and lee scoresby dies because he wanted he was like lyra that's someone I must protect at all costs and and also importantly um Lee Scoresby has lived his whole life we're having no moral compass and has lived very well do you know what I mean like yeah the conversation with Sarah Fede Peckler in the first book where he's like I don't really involve myself with this stuff I just take money and I do jobs and also I think the temptation is always to think of him as like he's a balloonist he loves the balloon it's like no he's very much like no I'm ballooning so I can get my farm in the midwest yeah he's a person who has loved nothing and then he loves something and he dies for it and that's what makes him noble oh no she's gone again actually I find Lee Scoresby and Hester to be just so yeah to be like oh right yeah you can find a course like so it's never too late you can spend your whole life kind of drifting and then you're like oh no this is the thing that matters to me I do think a big part of this book and maybe this is like a good note to end on

1:38:46find the thing that matters to you a huge part of this book is find the thing that matters to you and then do everything to take care of it and that's the subtle knife I guess a book for children a book for children such as me in my grandma's house being like I don't understand this I'll be carrying it around with me probably for the next 10 years and I'll tell you that's how you got away with it man you and Kerry being like what the fuck is this I mean I never finished it in Kerry how dare you I literally threw it across the room and then yelled at my mum and that's why children are ungrateful little shits goodbye bye everyone we'll be back with the amber spyglass in due course I guess

1:39:35Thank you.